Dead End Nights

Nights of Noir

Photo by Hannah Levbarg

Teeming with hardboiled private dicks steeped in alcohol and battered by billy clubs, and with lean fedora-clad gumshoes propped in the penumbras of lonely lampposts, casing leggy dames holding dark secrets, the noir genre has obsessed writers and directors from Raymond Chandler to Stanley Kubrick. Think Bogey and Bacall, Spade and Marlowe. For three Sunday nights, and three nights only, Dead End Nights celebrates these wizened dramas in all their sordid glory with a series of radio plays, lectures and secret screenings of mystery flicks. The series opens Sunday, June 15, with James Reich’s lecture Real Literature of America. Author of the novels Bombshell and I, Judas, Reich is a specialist in the form who’ll share his insights about noir’s influence on modern literature. Opening night also includes the radio play Lugdunum Falls, written and performed by Brianna Stallings and Marya Errin Jones, as well as a screening of an undisclosed B-movie. Head down to Tannex (1417 Fourth Street SW) on this strip of old Route 66 to catch the gigs: June 15, 22 and 29, 6pm. $5. Visit thetannex.com for more info. (Ian Wolff)